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PixelJunk Eden
PlayStation Network
Is This Enjoyable While Sober?
2.5/5 stars
“PixelJunk Eden” (“Eden”) is the third PSN game developed and published by Japanese Indie developer, Q-Games. Q-Games has made a concerted effort to ensure that each game in their ‘PixelJunk’ franchise, aside from those with a numeral in the title, is a different genre. Thus they have given the gaming community a racing game, a tower defense game, a series of two map-based SHMUPs, a scrolling SHMUP, and some kind of rhythm game. Then there’s “Eden,” a so-called 2D platformer. When I purchased “Eden” from the PSN store, I had not yet discovered the Indie games movement, and my only previous experience with the ‘PixelJunk’ series was frustration from the tower defense of “Monsters.” Thus my rationale of purchasing “Eden” because it was ‘cheap’ and ‘old-school’ was somewhat uninformed. Now that I have finally gotten around to playing “Eden,” it is as a grizzled veteran of Indie games who has seen their prices drop to as little as $3 compared to “Eden’s” unchanging $15 price-tag, and who has experienced a much wider swath of what the Indie scene has to offer. Is “Eden” able to meet the challenge posed by the Indie scene at large, or is it like the fabled hare who started the race with a massive early lead only to lose due to overconfidence?
Presentation
“Eden” is a rather unpleasant game to look at and to listen to. While the game is entirely 2D, and the player character(s) are all sprites, the character(s) and enemies are so tiny that any artistic effort that went into designing the sprites is lost. Instead, the game’s graphics focus entirely on the backgrounds and environments, which are 2D, vector-based, and completely psychedelic. Instead of actually showing the player a garden environment (the titular edens), the game presents an abstraction of a garden, with either a solid-colored background or kaleidoscopic background overlaid by vector-based splashes of virtual paint that smear and flow into vague representations of plants, flowers, and rocks. While it’s true that some people are able to appreciate ‘modern’ art more than others, I fall into the camp of those who think it’s crap.
Of course, graphics are completely subjective. As long as a game is represented in such a way that it’s possible for the player(s) to tell what’s going on, it should be considered as having graphics that are ‘good enough.’ Unfortunately for “Eden,” the massive scales of the environments clashes with the tiny scales of the character(s), enemies, and collectables, making things hard to see and causing confusion in multi-player games by recoloring character sprites in certain stages. Even worse, more than one stage features a background color scheme that prevents the display of vital information, such as the direction of a gameplay objective.
Soundwise, “Eden” doesn’t get any better. To complement the psychedelic visuals, the game features a grating soundtrack of techno music… I guess it could be called ‘house music’ or ‘dubstep.’ As someone with a somewhat extensive musical background and an appreciation for music that is actually musical, I found “Eden’s” soundtrack unbearable. Had I not been playing this game as a local multi-player experience, thus drowning-out a lot of the background music with couch chatter, I would have had to mute it. Of course, the reward for completely clearing the game is the ability to load custom soundtracks, which is too little, too late.
Story
“Eden” doesn’t have any kind of ongoing narrative. The only premise of the game is that one-or-more little garden creatures, called Grimps, who resemble a cross between a gnome and a leaf-hopper, must fill seeds with pollen in order to populate each of 10 gardens with flowers while collecting pulsating clumps of light and sound called Spectra. There is no justification or explanation of why the Grimps would want to collect Spectra, nor is there any explanation of what Grimps actually are, nor why they seem to be in perpetual war with flower-shaped creatures called Pollen Prowlers. The entire framework of the game seems like something a Stoner would come up with after smoking a huge bowl and passing out in the flowerbed outside of a house hosting a techno dance-party.
Gameplay
One-to-four players can simultaneously enter the world of “Eden” and cooperatively collect the five Spectra in each of the game’s 10 stages (plus 5 optional DLC stages in “PixelJunk Eden Encore”). Player(s) start on a stage-select map with only a single garden open. As the player(s) collect Spectra, the stage-select map fills with plants and opens portals to additional gardens.
Upon starting a stage, player(s) must begin the hunt for Spectra while racing against a timer. Each player’s Grimp can hop (not walk) in any direction by holding the left analog stick and pressing one of the face buttons. A Grimp standing on a piece of plant material can also attach a piece of spider-silk upon jumping by holding the face button used to initiate the jump. Holding R1 allows a Grimp swinging from silk to reel-in the thread before it breaks, thus returning to the surface where the thread was attached. By hitting enemies with their bodies or silk, Grimps can destroy the enemies and release pollen. Touching pollen ‘collects’ it and sends it into the nearest unfilled seed. When a seed is filled, a Grimp must jump into it to get it to blossom, thus creating more plant life that acts as additional platforms for the Grimps to use in their exploration of each garden. It is also possible to collect crystals scattered about each garden in order to extend the timer.
The hunt for Spectra revolves around looking for ‘flashes’ at the edges of the screen to indicate the direction of any nearby Spectra, which are sometimes impossible to see due to a stage’s color scheme. In order to completely clear a garden, it’s necessary to replay it 5 times, collecting one Spectra the first time, two the second, three the third, four the fourth, and finally all five. The Spectra never change location, thus the requirement to re-collect all of them each time through a garden feels like tedious busy-work. Some of the stages have gimmicks, like teleporters or changing gravity, to mix things up, but the standard formula remains the same through the entire game.
The single-player versus multi-player experience leans strongly toward multi-player being more fun. The game forces all of the players to remain fairly close to each other and ‘kills’ Grimps who go off-screen for more than about 3 seconds. However, there is no lives system; instead dead Grimps simply respawn on top of a random living Grimp. If all players die at the same time, the game respawns all of the Grimps back at the stage’s beginning, and if the timer runs out, the game allows the players to continue with a refilled timer from the last Spectra collected. The ability to explore and fall off of things without having to worry about being sent back to the beginning each time is an invaluable feature of multi-player. Of course, the ability of Grimps to grab onto each other is a bit of a double-edged sword, as it allows players to both save each other and to accidentally interfere with each other’s jumps.
Overall
“PixelJunk Eden” is a very weird game that barely manages to qualify for the classification of ‘2D Platformer’ despite not following any of the gameplay paradigms set forth by the most popular games/franchises of that genre. While the gameplay is reasonably sound, yet repetitive, the abstract graphics and psychedelic colors frequently make it hard to follow the onscreen action or figure out the direction of gameplay goals. Maybe someone who enjoys illicit substances would find this game mindblowingly amazing while under the influence. But as someone who spends all of his time sober, I can’t recommend this as a good experience.
Presentation: 2/5
Story: 0.5/5
Gameplay: 3/5
Overall (not an average): 2.5/5
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